Bring in the cyberpolice

Cyberspace is getting scary. Those sleazy porn sites. Viruses. Gaudier and gaudier ads. Unstoppable spam e-mail. You click OK on an e-commerce item and hope that your money doesn't vanish into some Internet bandit's account in Lagos. If things get much worse, logging on to the Net may be as perilous as straying into a bad part of town after dark.

An exaggeration? Robert Cailliau, the co-inventor of the World Wide Web, doesn't think so.

"There was a time when the community that was on the Net was homogenous and civilized," sighs Cailliau. "Now it's not. We're in the middle of chaos. It may calm down. But the alternative is that there's a total meltdown of the system and that it becomes unusable. That would be a catastrophe. We must regulate [the Web] if we want to have some civilization left. And it's getting urgent."

As staffers at Geneva's European Laboratory for Particle Physics (a 20-country research collaboration known by its French acronym, CERN) in the early 1990s, Cailliau and a now high-profile British colleague, Tim Berners-Lee, developed the address formats and other standards to create the World Wide Web (see letter, p. 8). Berners-Lee is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has just published a book titled Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by its Inventor (Harper San Francisco).

Today the lower-profile Cailliau, a 52-year-old Belgian native, heads up Web communications at CERN and spends much of his time with the International World Wide Web Consortium, a standard-setting body.

How would Cailliau make the Web more civil and less chaotic? Chatting with FORBES GLOBAL in his cramped CERN office recently, he worried that the proliferation of advertising on the Web is greatly diluting the medium's usefulness. "The forced influence of advertising has given us completely useless TV," he complains. "You don't want that on the Net. But most on-line information providers need to attract advertising-which slows download times and clutters the screen with windows."

The bandwidth explosion will solve the speed problem, but it won't address the clutter problem. To reduce the Web's dependence on advertising, Cailliau proposes a so-called micropayment system wherein Web surfers would pay a nominal fee every time they download a page from the Web. "It would change the landscape completely if [Web site owners] could live by providing a high-quality, responsive service," says Cailliau.

How would the micropayments idea work? Cailliau replies: "An article from a newspaper would [cost users] something on the order of a cent or less, but a really hot item could be several cents, depending on what the author thinks he or she can get away with. If you find it too expensive, you go somewhere else. The site that's too expensive loses clients."

Cailliau points to France's Minitel system, which operates over France Telecom's wires. From public or private terminals, Minitel users pay modest amounts for access to information on everything from movie schedules to restaurant reviews-with not an ad in sight. "You know what you're going to pay, and you know what you're going to get," says Cailliau.

But doesn't Minitel charge users according to time spent on-line, rather than per-page fees for service providers? "That's the wrong model," Cailliau concedes. "But even that bad model has been shown to be commercially successful-even today, parallel to the Web. I always believed that if we did not have the telecom monopolies in Europe at the time of Minitel's introduction-if anyone in all of Europe could have subscribed to it-it would have spread like wildfire. 'Minitel Version Two' would have been what the Web is now."

Cailliau's other proposal to save the Web from its own success: license all Internet users, the way automobile drivers must be licensed to use public streets. In defense of this controversial idea, Cailliau says: "To get a license, people would have to learn basic behavior: choosing an Internet service provider; connecting to the Web; writing e-mails; problem diagnosis; censoring your own computer; and setting up a site. More important than that: knowing what dangers to expect and knowing how the Internet can influence others."

But wouldn't licensing, by making Internet users more traceable and accountable, run counter to the free spirit of the Web-which helped it develop so rapidly? And wouldn't licensing also crimp the Internet's power to fight Big Government's power?

Perhaps. But Cailliau does insist on pointing out that "if you operate a TV or radio station, you have to have a license. It has nothing to do with fundamental freedom. It has to do with protection of the average citizen against abuses."

Cailliau doesn't minimize the technical difficulties of regulating the Web, but he's convinced that it's the only way forward.

"Everybody thinks that licenses are perfectly all right on the roads, because of the danger to life and limb. But one can equally cause a lot of harm by spreading false and dangerous information. Sooner or later someone is going to be able to trace the death of a person to an Internet act. Then [the licensing question] will probably be taken seriously."